What’s cooking?
#3 – High-Performance Blenders
When it comes to blending the smoothest liquids, nothing beats a high-performance blender. If you ever wondered how smoothie shops get frozen drinks to be so smooth compared to a normal home blender or how restaurants get certain soups or curries so smooth and yours at home for some reason come out grainy or chunky? It’s because they use high-performance blenders.
What’s the difference between a regular blender and a high-performance blender? Mostly, it’s power. For example, let’s compare the popular Blend Jet handheld blender and the Hamilton Beach Ensemble. The Blend Jet has a 15-watt motor, and the Hamilton Beach blender has a 700-watt motor. Neither is a high-performance blender, even though they are vastly different in power.
High-performance blenders usually have a wattage between 1200-1500 watts. To put that into perspective, a small boat engine can have a little over 2 horsepower which is around 1500 watts. High-performance blenders have a motor almost powerful enough to slap on the back of a small boat. Now that’s impressive!
Powerful blenders like these not only pulverize food into the smoothest puree but by blending for a few minutes the blades can spin so fast that they can create enough friction to heat your food. If you want a quick hot soup, you could put in some sauteed veggies and broth and within a few minutes, it’ll be a steaming hot soup. You could make a quick salsa con queso with a little cheddar cheese, milk, and salsa. You can’t really do that with regular blenders.
These blenders are also great for pureeing frozen fruits for smoothies or protein shakes. All those little seeds in strawberries, blackberries, or raspberries get pulverized into nothing with this type of blender.
My Recommendation: Vitamix 5200 Blender Professional
If you’re wondering which Vitamix to buy, this is one of the best blenders on the market. It’s powerful and makes the smoothest purees. Seeds from tomatoes that get missed in normal blenders are obliterated in the Vitamix. You can make the smoothest sorbet or smoothie, with no need to strain out blackberry or raspberry seeds. They get pulverized in the Vitamix.
If you have a juicer and deal with the mess of cleaning up all the fiber that’s filtered out while juicing — with a Vitamix you can just pulverize the fruit into a puree, fiber, and all. Clean-up is also a breeze: you just fill the blender half full with water and add a drop of dish soap, turn it on high, then rinse it out. It doesn’t get any easier than that.
Runner Up: Ninja Professional Plus Kitchen System
Spiced Palate 